Last night I was the speaker at the Mass ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement) meeting. I talked about how we convinced our executives to use social media. I deconstructed the actual presentation we used. Many thanks to Jean Marrapodi for live tweeting and creating the backchannel.

At first I was nervous because no one was asking questions. I hate that – I love things to be interactive when I present or teach. Brian told me later it was because people were taking notes. But once the questions started coming, wow did we have a great conversation!

Someone got us on a kick about noise vs signal. When I started talking about affinity he said “If you have high affinity you probably have high signal, but if you have high reach you probably have a greater chance of having higher noise”. Very true, and something I’ll probably be blogging about more. Because that I think that statement is more profound that it seems at first glance.

Someone asked about measuring performance. I was able to talk about my favorite learnarchists, Harold Jarche and Jay Cross. If I measure learning – or attendance at a learning event – is that the same as measuring performanace? So can I measure informal learning – or do I even care about trying to measure that as long as the learning gets done so that performance is high?

I also loved that someone asked “how do you get people to lurk?”. That is what got us into the affinity/reach discussion.

Here are my slides from last night. It was wonderful meeting and talking with all of you, I really appreciated the conversation. It was great to come talk about something I really love with a bunch of very smart people. I can’t wait to come to another meeting in the fall.